---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: 'The Anxiety of Academia: Academics, Legitimation and Discipline in Contemporary Metafiction'
date: 2015-02-15
image:
feature: anxietyofacademia.png
categories:
- Literature
comments: []
---
Since 2012, I have been slowly working on a book about contemporary metafiction. A lot of this work was done over weekends in the last year, as a break from the more practical undertakings that I do full-time in the week. The book was originally called "Metafiction After the Millennium" and was supposed to chart a type of post-postmodern (urgh) shift. As I've become more embroiled in the political economies of research publication, my interests have shifted and I became obsessed with the ways in which contemporary metafiction interacts with the academy. The book is really getting there now. As a cathartic exercise, though, I thought I'd share the current table of contents and a paragraph-by-paragraph outline of the introduction.
I also don't know if anyone else does this, but I find it really helpful to write a single line, nested-depth summary of what I've already written so that I can see whether, when written out, the argument makes sense and is connected. I will, probably, change some of this as the final iterations of the book come together. In the meantime, though, I hope this might be of interest to some, just to share what I am working on. I hope to publish the book with an open-access publisher when it's ready.

Introduction

Tale of the Eloquent Peasant
History of text: Metafiction
Also highlights academics: disjunct of “praise” → punishment
Story designed for “educated” readers
Stakes of book
Legitimation of fiction against the academy
Ethics of metafiction
Metafiction claimed as politically abortive
Metafiction is part of all fiction
Metafiction is critique
Metafiction interlinked with university & in competition with English
Canon Wars: university weaker gatekeeper
Market canon processes: Eaglestone
Contemporary fiction appraises works once published
Linked to labour economy of the academy
English not market condition of possibility for lit fiction
Metafiction and Morality
Targets: metafiction post-2000 and Anglo-American academic reading practices
Existing studies of metafiction
Reconfiguration by Mark Currie (after Robert Scholes)
Merger of fiction and criticism
Metafiction is critique
Academic attacks on metafiction are reflexive attacks
Metafiction linked to worldwide Theory-saturation of English programmes
US-specific context: “program era”
Zadie Smith's On Beauty
Scientism and objectifying aesthetics
Elaine Scarry
Cyclical satire vs. engagement with literary studies
Metafiction was never amoral
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
Genealogies of contemporary power
The Emerging Archive and “The Contemporary”
Eaglestone's not-yet-problems
Ever-expanding emerging archive
Problem formation
Genealogy as solution
Colin Koopman's reading of genealogy: twin vectors for sites of change
Chart contemporary emergence as solution to twin problems
Vectors: academic reading practices and contemporary metafiction
Problems to which emergence responds
Canon: overbearingly white male
Value: claims too strong for academic contrib to literary market
Competition: fiction vs. criticism
Taxonomy of Anti-Academic Fiction
Purposes of taxonomies
Methodologies of exclusion
This book:
Not the campus novel
Representations at sites distant from the university
Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document
Pragmatic exclusions: everyone has another book about academics
Not books just by and for academics
These works:
Enact distant critiques of the university
Attempt to discipline the academy
Have an anxiety of academia
Geographical specificity not elided
Map of book